Carefully exposing children to more misinformation can make them better fact-checkers, study finds

At a time when online misinformation is seemingly everywhere and objective facts are often disputed, UC Berkeley psychologists have presented a somewhat paradoxical partial solution in a new study: exposing young children to more misinformation by line, no less.

Doing so in limited circumstances, and with careful monitoring and education, can help children acquire the tools they’ll need to sort fact from fiction online, said Evan Orticio, a Ph.D. student in the psychology department at UC Berkeley and lead author of a paper published Oct. 10 in the journal Human behavior.

Orticio argues that given children’s natural skepticism and early exposure to the Internet’s boundless misinformation, it is crucial that adults teach them practical fact-checking skills. Instead of attempting to completely sanitize their online environment, he said adults should work to equip children with tools to critically evaluate the information they encounter.

“We need to give children the experience of being skeptical and using their critical thinking skills in this online context in order to prepare them for their future, where they will be in these close 24/7 contexts days a week,” Orticio said. .

Orticio and his colleagues used two experiments involving 122 children aged 4 to 7 to test how their levels of skepticism changed in different online environments.

The first study exposed them to an e-book containing varying degrees of true and false statements about animals. For example, alongside a picture of a zebra, some children were shown truths, such as that zebras have black and white stripes. Others have learned lies that zebras are red and green.

Based on this information, they indicated whether the claims were true or false. A second study simulated search engine results and presented similar facts and fiction about animals.

Next, children rated the truth of a new claim in that same numerical context, this time about an alien species called Zorpies. On a screen were images of 20 so-called Zorpies. One of the alien’s faces showed that it had three eyes; the rest of the Zorpies wore dark sunglasses that hid their eyes.

The children were then asked to decide if all Zorpies had three eyes. But before making their final decision, participants were allowed to fact-check by touching any number of aliens, removing their sunglasses and revealing their eyes. As the children knew nothing about extraterrestrials, their skepticism could only come from their assessment of the reliability of this digital platform.

The researchers found that the children who were most diligent in fact-checking the Zorpies’ claims were also the ones who had seen more false animal claims earlier in the study. Meanwhile, those who had more reliable environments with fewer false claims earlier in the study did almost no fact-checking. A computer simulation confirmed that children living in less trustworthy environments were more likely to debunk potential misinformation.

“Children may adapt their level of skepticism based on the quality of information they have seen before in a digital context,” Orticio said. “They can leverage their expectations about how this digital environment will work to make reasonable adjustments to how much they trust or distrust information at face value, even if they know almost nothing about the content itself.”

The project was born out of an urgent need to understand how children are faring in an increasingly connected world. Previous research has found that about a third of children have used social media before the age of 9, and that minors encounter health misinformation within minutes of creating a TikTok account.

Even platforms supposedly aimed at young audiences, like YouTube Kids, have become spaces for toxic content and misinformation. This is a particular problem, Orticio pointed out, because parents may feel like these are safe places for their children to explore.

But as the new research shows, this can give a false sense of security and allow lies and problematic content to go unchecked and be seen as true and acceptable.

“Our work suggests that if children have some experience working in controlled, but imperfect environments, where they have encountered things that are not quite right, and we show them the process of determining what is actually true and what is not, that will define with the hope of being more vigilant,” Orticio said.

Orticio knows that not all parents have the time to constantly monitor their child’s media habits. Rather than trying to create the most sanitized Internet space, he said parents should talk with their children about how to fact-check claims and talk about what they see.

It’s also important to have clear expectations about what a platform can or cannot offer.

“It’s not that we need to reinforce skepticism per se. It’s that we need to give them the opportunity to use that skepticism to their advantage,” Orticio said. “In our experiments, fact-checking was very simple. In real life, fact-checking is actually very difficult. We need to fill this gap.”